Zynga Needs to 'Clean Up Their Act' Before Hitting Wall Street

Zynga, the company responsible for Mafia Wars and FarmVille has gone from a Silicon Valley start-up to media darling almost overnight, and the entire nation seems to be under its spell. An article on CNN Money points out that company's been featured on on the front page of the New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, Time and, of course, AOL's Games.com.

While some speculate the flush social gaming company has big plans to go public, industry analysts say that there's a few things Zynga needs to do before going IPO -- first and foremost "clean up their act," meaning make sure they're keeping their nose clean business-wise after getting caught with scammy ads in their games.

Another analyst say social games need to prove themselves worthy. While Zynga will reportedly bring in roughly $200 million in revenue this year, success on Wall Street will depend on a proven track record. That may be difficult to do until Zynga (and the other social game makers) can prove that FarmVille and the rest of these games are more than a fad.

"Five years from now, I can safely say a lot of us will still be using Facebook, but I can't say that a lot of us will still be playing FarmVille," Gartner analyst Ray Valdes says in the article.

Of course, that leaves us wondering: is social gaming a fad? Right now, it's too early to call, but with companies like EA spending millions for Playfish in an effort to get into this space, it looks like social games are quickly going from cool Facebook app to an extension of the well-established billion dollar game industry that's not going anywhere anytime soon. We suspect that even if Zynga goes IPO, they'll eventually be bought out by a company like Activision, which will pay big bucks to own games like FarmVille and, more importantly, use Zynga's know how to translate mega-franchises like Guitar Hero for the Facebook gaming set.